Troy pulled a face. "They keep those pretzels stacked up to the rafters in warehouses in Jersey, with the rats running over them."
"Guess I made the right choice, then."
"Maybe you should break the rule and see what happens. It doesn't sound like you like the people you work with all that much."
"Oh, most of them are all right," Claire said, thinking of Lori. With some effort, she pushed away a mental picture of sitting in Roland's office tomorrow, surrounded by elephants and the miasma of his sullen lust.
As they left the deli, Troy took her free hand. "I wish you had more time here. Promise me you'll come back."
"I want to," she said, but it was Dante's face that flashed into her mind. In a few days her adventures here would seem like a dream.
"What are you thinking about?" Troy was examining her with a half-smile.
"Just that I don't want to go home." They had slowed to a walk and now were standing outside an apartment building. The glass doors revealed floors of black and white marble. Between two elevators was a huge arrangement of colorful flowers. Only a few inches away from them, but on the other side of the glass, the doorman sat reading a tabloid, seemingly oblivious to their presence.
"That's the only thing you're thinking?" Troy didn't give her time to answer, just took her chin in his hand and gave her a kiss. To anchor her in the world, Claire kept her eyes open, so that she saw the edge of Troy's face, a slice of the sidewalk on which they stood, the doorman's expressionless eyes watching them.
After a second, Claire stepped back. "I don't know, Troy," she said, not spelling out what she didn't know. "I have to go now or I'll miss my plane." Already, though, Troy seemed insubstantial, like a character in a movie who was so real on-screen but faded away by the time you walked to your car.
"Call me," he said, and she nodded without speaking, then walked the last block to the hotel.
As she pulled open the hotel's heavy brass-bound glass door, Claire was nearly bowled over by a man in a dark overcoat wearing a hat pulled low. His flat, acne-scarred face registered nothing, even when she fell to one knee.
At the touch of her key, the door to Claire's hotel room swung open. She let out a startled gasp. A whirlwind had been through it, leaving nothing untouched. The mattress was upended, her suitcase emptied out and flung on top of the heap of her clothes, all the drawers pulled free from the dresser.
The upholstered chair that had stood next to the bed was now turned on its side. The netting on the bottom had been roughly torn away. Claire's breath hung suspended. She was staring into an empty cavity that had once held her painting.
Long before the taxi driver pulled to a stop at La Guardia, Claire had a ten and a twenty ready, clutched in damp fingers. She had spent the entire trip peering over the edge of the back seat trying to examine the drivers of the cars that swarmed around them—an impossible task. Her taxi driver, a dark-skinned man who had not said a single word during their trip, seemed to take her behavior in stride. Perhaps he was used to ferrying refugees from one calamity to another. While the taxi was still sighing to a stop, Claire thrust the money into his hand and was out the door. Underneath her buttoned-up—and, luckily, loose-fitting—jacket, she wore her backpack backward across her chest, the painting as strange and stiff as a bulletproof vest. But at least she still had it—for now.
The destruction of her hotel room had stunned Claire. The search had been hasty but thorough. Whoever had hunted through the room had found each hiding place she had, only a few hour! before, considered and rejected. They had tossed aside the mattress overturned drawers, emptied out her suitcase and slit the lining Even the bottom of the upholstered chair had been ripped open, the place where Claire had come so close to hiding the painting. She was lucky that their eyes hadn't fallen, as hers had, on the brown bulk of the air conditioner, set high in the window. It was here that she had lifted the painting the night before, taping it into place on the back, and it was here that, as she stood on her tiptoes, her searching fingers found again the reassuring give of the bubble wrap that still held the painting secure.
Claire had righted the chair and stood on it to free the painting. Only when it was in her hands did the tightness in her chest loosen a little. The bubble wrap revealed little lozenges of paint—a red fragment of carpet, a circle of cream-colored wall, a single blue eye, oddly magnified.
Only belatedly did it occur to her that whoever had done this could still be nearby. Balanced on the chair, the painting clutched to her chest, Claire eyed the closed bathroom door. Was that a faint sound? She caught her breath and strained to listen. Silence. Had she conjured the sound into being? Her eyes fell on the telephone. She could call the front desk, ask them to send someone up. Probably it would be the liveried young man whom she had passed a few minutes ago, surveying the lobby with his hands clasped in front of him. It seemed likely that he would become distracted by the mess. She could imagine him asking pointed questions about the destruction of her room, pulling out a calculator to add up the charges against her Visa card, not even looking up when the true perpetrator burst out of the bathroom, gun in hand.
There! That was definitely a sound. But now she realized what it was. A choking moan followed by a thump.
"Is there someone in there?" Claire called out. The only answer was another moan, louder this time. She hurriedly laid the painting in one of the empty drawers that had been abandoned on the carpet and covered it with the tossed-aside quilt. Taking a deep breath, she put her hand on the knob and pushed. The door gave only a few inches before it struck something waist-high made of silver metal.
Claire realized the door was jammed against the maid's cart. She shouldered her way in. In the middle of the floor was the maid herself, trussed up in a torn sheet. She lay amid a heap of canisters and bottles of various cleansers, efficiently hogtied, wrists to ankles, with a strip of white cloth over her eyes and another across her open mouth. As frantic as a bug on its back, she was straining without success against her bonds, the effort accompanied by the groans Claire had been hearing.
"It's okay!" Without planning to, Claire found herself whispering. "This is my room." The maid stopped struggling, and her head thumped softly on the floor, producing the same noise Claire had heard earlier.
The knots were pulled too tight for Claire's fingers to pick them free. She hurried to her backpack and returned with a Swiss Army knife. With great care, she slid the blade in between the woman's cheek and the white cloth, and cut away the blindfold. The woman's eyes, the pupils so dark they were nearly invisible, strained to focus on Claire before her body relaxed a little. Claire then cut the gag and pulled a wadded white washcloth from the other woman's mouth. The maid took long, shuddering breaths and worked her mouth, occasionally mumbling to herself in Spanish. Claire finished cutting her free, and the woman sat up and leaned against the white bathtub, rubbing the angry red marks on her wrists.
"Do you need a hospital?" Claire's best Spanish was rewarded with a blank look. She tried speaking more slowly. The woman shook her head, but Claire didn't know if it was because she still didn't understand her or because she was all right. She tried combining parts of a few more sentences from her Spanish tape. "Who has searched my suitcase?"
The woman's answer was in a Puerto Rican Spanish Claire could only haltingly follow. "I didn't see. I came in to clean the room. He was in the closet. Came behind me. He said I must close my eyes."
"Did he have a weapon?" The dire words from her "Let's Learn Spanish!" tape—hospital, search, weapon—were actually coming in handy.
"A gun, maybe. I felt something in my back."
Claire didn't completely understand, until the woman stood up and put a trembling finger between Claire's shoulder blades, miming the barrel of a gun—or perhaps only the tip of a finger.
"But a man, yes? Not a woman." The maid nodded, flexing her fingers as they slowly regained their color. "Was he tall or short?"
"I never saw him. All I know is
that he was taller than me."
Claire realized how useless this single piece of information was. The girl—for looking at her more closely, Claire realized she was about eighteen—was also tiny, probably no more than five feet tall. Any man would be taller than her.
"He left when he started beeping."
"What?" Claire didn't follow her words until the woman pointed at the beeper she wore on her belt. She could remember when a beeper was a status symbol, meant you were a surgeon or something. Now anyone could wear one, including a maid and a robber. "And you're not hurt?"
"No." The woman looked up at Claire. "You must have something he wants. He kept asking where you were."
Those words had been enough to push Claire into action. At any moment the man could return. She had scooped her things into her mutilated suitcase, slipped the painting into her backpack, put her backpack on so that it lay across her chest, and left the hotel via the staircase.
Now Claire sat in 16A, a window seat in economy class. The plane was floating somewhere over the Midwest, but she didn't have time to be distracted by the patchwork of green and tan fields threaded with placid rivers that lay below them. Instead she was trying to decide if any of the other passengers on the plane looked suspicious.
In the airport she had seen a man who looked like Dante from a distance, but on closer inspection he was ten years older and twenty pounds heavier. And twice she had thought she caught sight of Troy, but instead each man had turned out to be a bored businessman in a crisp expensive suit, with a cellular phone in one hand and a calfskin briefcase in the other.
The plane was full, and the economy-class seats were arranged so that Flybees could pack in as many people as possible. Before coming to work for the state, Lori had been a stewardess. What had Lori told her Flybees was known as? Greyhound of the sky? Even when she stood in the half-crouch necessary to avoid banging her head on the overhead bin, Claire found she couldn't see everyone. Her seat- mates, a young couple in love with being in love, didn't look up from their nibbles and kisses.
She didn't even know who she was looking for. Dante? Troy? The acne-scarred man who had nearly knocked her down outside her hotel? A man in a baseball cap, like the man who had chased her through the American Museum of Natural History? A stranger who would refuse to meet her eyes? She tried to remember who she had told about this flight. Charlie, of course. But Claire also had a vague memory of telling Dante about the good deal she had gotten on the ticket price. And hadn't Troy asked her—perhaps, in retrospect, a shade too casually?—about her flight before he left her this morning?
But then again, Troy had been with her while her room was being broken into. Which made Dante a more likely culprit. Claire remembered the intensity with which he had talked about the painting, and the way his mouth had softened when he looked at it, like someone anticipating a kiss. She had actually felt a flash of jealousy of the painted woman. Dante had desired the painting for itself, not for the money it might represent.
But what if Dante were right? What if the painting was worth a fortune twenty times over? That would be enough to tempt any man to steal it, no matter if it were beautiful or not. And if Dante were right, that meant that Troy was wrong. Had Troy deliberately lied to her when he told her the painting was a pastiche? That would explain why he had asked her to sell it to him in Avery's viewing room. But if he had really planned on cheating her, why had he stopped asking her to let him sell it for her?
Her thoughts chased themselves, doubled back and came to the same dead ends. What had Dante called the hallmark of Vermeer's technique? Circles of confusion? For Claire, the question of who was trying to take the painting from her was beginning to overshadow the question of who had actually painted it.
She slid back down into her seat as a new thought occurred to her. Even if all the other passengers on this plane were what they appeared—travelers in search of a cheap fare—there was nothing to stop the hunter from following her to Portland. It would be easy enough to track her down. Claire winced a little, realizing it could be as simple as looking up her name in the phone book.
The painting, it was clear, wouldn't be safe stashed away at home. Whoever was after this painting was serious about it, and Charlie, despite her "Self-Defense for Seniors" classes, would be no match for whoever had neatly hogtied the maid this morning. Claire gave the painting a gentle pat through her jacket as she thought about where to hide it. It needed to be someplace she could get to fairly easily, but also a place others wouldn't be able to easily access. It had to be safe from the elements and from accidental discovery. Nothing seemed quite right, but she finally settled on an idea.
Still, she needed to warn Charlie. Her eyes focused on the phone set into the back of the seat ahead of her. There was a groove for a charge card, and the tiny print detailed outrageous charges. But Charlie—who had left Germany fifty years ago but still had a Teutonic sense of punctuality—would be awaiting Claire's homecoming. Claire's stomach rumbled a little at the thought of something warm and homemade—maybe a roast and mashed potatoes? Hiding the painting was going to delay her at least an hour. She reached for her Visa card.
The phone rang once, twice. Claire looked at her watch, frowning as she calculated the time in Portland. She knew Charlie's schedule as well as her own, and on a Sunday night at 7:15, the older woman would be settled down with a glass of red wine in front of 60 Minutes. Charlie enjoyed the fact that most of the age-spotted hosts were nearly as old as she was, yet they still kept busy exposing evil and wrongdoing.
After the fourth ring, the answering machine clicked on. Charlie's recorded voice sounded crackly and insubstantial as she repeated their phone number—she thought that by not saying their names she kept them safe from anyone who might take advantage of women on their own—and instructions to leave a message at the tone. As she waited for the beep, Claire decided that Charlie must be at the nearby Hoot Owl Market, otherwise known as the Korean Food Museum, since the other customers only stopped in for beer and cigarettes. But Charlie and the owner, with his handwritten and completely unconvincing sign warning Propertees under survallance, had gradually become good friends. They traded recipes—his for Korean barbecue, hers foi sauerbraten—and he had even prevailed upon her to try kimchi. Over time, Charlie had persuaded him to stock real vanilla extract, ultrafine sugar and marzipan alongside cheap plastic lighters and twelve-dollar bags of Huggies. And that was where Charlie probably was now—al the Hoot Owl, asking Mike (as the owner styled himself in America^ just how old the eggs really were.
The beep sounded. "Charlie—it's me. I'll be home about an hour later than I thought. Something has come up that I need to take care of. And I also wanted to warn you to be careful about, about"— suddenly Claire thought of eavesdroppers, of her voice echoing ir the empty living room for anyone to hear—"about talking to people you don't know, okay? And I'll see you real soon." Claire ended with the words that were easier to say to Charlie than her own mother. "I love you."
She slid the phone back into its slot and tried to relax. Her thoughts were too skittery to allow her to focus on the book she had packed five days ago. It was a nonfiction account of how the world would soon be destroyed by plagues unleashed by the overuse of antibiotics. Claire found it hard to worry about the planet's long- term survival when her own in the short term seemed to be in jeopardy. The man across the aisle pushed the bell for the stewardess, who returned a few minutes later with a copy of The New York Times. Claire pressed her own call button.
"Do you have any more copies of the Times?” The woman's makeup was effectively a mask, making her look like a sister to the other stewardesses on board, even though they came from varied racial backgrounds. Lori had told Claire that in stew school they had spent more time learning makeup application than safety procedures.
"Sorry. I just gave out the last one."
"What other newspapers do you have?"
"The Wall Street Journal and the Oregonian."
Cla
ire didn't have the energy to read WSJ, with its conservative editorials that always made her so angry that she found herself talking out loud to the paper. "I'll take the Oregonian."
She started with the Metro section, figuring that most of the front section would be world news a day old, cribbed from the Times she had been reading every day in New York. So the plane was already circling Portland before she read the front page.
***
Woman Killed by Car Bomb Identified
A woman killed Friday in southwest Portland when her car
exploded has been identified as Sonia Wallin, 37. Police say the
bomb appears to have been detonated when she turned the ignition. Wallin was killed instantly. Her car, an older-model Mazda 323, was destroyed.
A Multnomah Village neighbor, who did not want to be identified, said that Wallin was the mother of two girls, ages 7 and 9. The children were at school at the time of the explosion. They are now being cared for by a relative. Neighbors said that Wallin had been divorced for less than a year, and that her ex-husband, Richard Wallin, a former mill worker, was rumored to have been angry over the divorce.
A police spokesman declined to say whether Richard Wallin was a suspect in his ex-wife's death, saying only that he was a "person of interest."
***
Claire's eardrums filled with the sound of her own heart beating fast and hard. From her daily runs, she knew every car in the streets around her neighborhood. And she could think of only one other Mazda 323 in Multnomah Village besides her own. The one she passed every morning on the way to work. The one where the woman behind the wheel was like a Latina reflection of Claire, with her hand stretched out in a wave as they drove past each other. The neighbor's Mazda 323 that was exactly like Claire's—only hers had been parked at the airport for the past five days.
QS10ALL
Chapter 22Claire sat in her car, parked just off Broadway Boulevard, her eyes on her office building. The seventeen-story building was dark except for the first floor and two or three scattered offices where someone had come in to catch up over the weekend. She counted up to the thirteenth floor, but it was dark. Claire didn't know what she was looking for, but she watched the building anyway. In the darkened interior of the car, her breathing sounded loud and a little fast. Her throat was tight and her hands were slick on the hard plastic of the steering wheel.